Blizzard Responds To Issues With Australian Overwatch Servers

Yesterday we reported Australians were having difficulties with Blizzard's local servers for Overwatch.

Blizzard has now officially responded to those complaints.

The issue: players were not able to play on local servers and were instead being re-routed to US servers, meaning that players went from 20-40ms pings to 150-200ms. Not ideal. A thread was posted on June 12 complaining about the situation, which exacerbated late last week and continued to plague users over the weekend.

"After really digging into this over the weekend, we’ve been able to confirm that there is indeed an issue preventing some players in the Americas region from being matched into local servers—specifically those near/around Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil," Blizzard wrote.

According to the post, this issue is specific to PC players. Console players should have no problem. Blizzard also acknowledged that the issue appeared to escalate last Thursday.

At this stage, Blizzard is still looking into things and has no idea when the issue might be resolved. Mostly likely it won't be fixed this week.

"We’re still investigating possible causes, so we don’t have a solid ETA on when everything will get back to normal," explained Blizzard. "Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to identify the bug and implement a permanent solution this week, but we’ll be trying out some things over the next few days that may improve your experience for a short time. This would only be a temporary band-aid, though; our biggest priority is to find a fix that addresses the problem at its source.

"We’re super sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to update everyone as soon as we make any sort of major progress. Thanks again for letting us know something was wrong, and most of all for your continued support."

“We’re still investigating possible causes, so we don’t have a solid ETA on when everything will get back to normal,” explained Blizzard. “Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to identify the bug and implement a permanent solution this week, but we’ll be trying out some things over the next few days that may improve your experience for a short time. This would only be a temporary band-aid, though; our biggest priority is to find a fix that addresses the problem at its source.

I'm reading on places like Reddit that it could be down to ISP?
I'm on iinet and play almost exclusively after 9pm - 10pm (once the kid is down and dinner has been had) and don't seem to have had much of a problem.

I haven't had the issue myself, but from what I've read it's almost certainly not ISP. Some people have been jumping through hoops for ages trying to get it to run well, when it had previously been fine for them. They also don't have issues with lag for any game but this. Good to see Blizz is looking into the problem at least

Hmm, I had no problems last night. Have been put on US/international servers before with ping > 200ms (I live in Perth on NBN), so it's certainly not fun - and as a result I always have the net stats up; last night was a stable 50ms

Actually, on Battle.net, all of those countries fall under the Americas region by default (though you can connext to any region you like at a pinch). That's why players from those countries (other than Brazil) usually ask Blizzard for Americas servers that are based in Singapore or Australia: it sucks being forced to connect to players ~250 ms away.

The American region includes Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil for their games so even if there aren't many people online at once in those regions the players can still get a match relatively quickly.